Cosmonauts Day – Paths of The Restless (2011)

I had absolutely no expectations for this band going in, and especially not when they described themselves as “post-metal/progressive sludge”. They got me with the first half, and lost me with the second half, but I took a chance with it.

Cosmonauts Day (I keep putting an apostrophe where it shouldn’t be) is a band that is essentially genre-less. Not in the “indie band” kind of genre-less, but more like they include so many different types of heavy music that it’s hard to pin them to just one. At times they play post-metal, I even hit some progressive sludge, and then they encompass some incredible hardcore punk elements (which I LOVE [these people must know me]) at 2:20 on “The Art of Being Nothing”. Their sound reminds me a lot of Rosetta and Mouth of the Architect (minus the vocals), but over a much shorter time span. Excluding a few outliers, their average song length is roughly 3:30-4:00 long, which is pretty short for an instrumental band, especially post-metal and even MORE especially mixed with sludge, which sometimes takes a lot to develop perfectly with just instrumentals.

Positives are not hard to come by with this band. Their songs never get old, and never start sounding the same (the Dragonforce Effect), which is very good news for a post-metal band. They sounded extremely professional for their first recording and have a very unique style, which I hope they stick with. The few negatives I have are only minor, but can sometimes add up. Instrumental music had notoriously long build-ups, which sometimes are necessary without vocals to use as guides for transitions. On occasion, Cosmonauts Day takes you from a quiet build-up and throws you into the fray of heavy, powerful guitars (1:44 on “Cave of Trees” is quite a clear example). It was like driving 10 KMH on a side street and then getting smashed by a train. This only happens a couple of times throughout the course of the record, but it was certainly jarring. It came to be expected when the songs are only 4 minutes long, and wasn’t unbearable, it just sometimes wasn’t pleasant.

With the album tile and the fierce genre description, no one was informed Cosmonauts Day had a pretty side to them. Underneath the sludge and all the stuff Ricky dreams about lies a simple, clean post-rock track at the end of Path of The Restless, titled “The Last Watchman”. This is what really tied the album together for me; anyone can throw a bunch of really heavy tracks back to back and call it a day, but it takes a talented group of guys to make an impressively beautiful, Caspian-sounding song and place it so well with the others. Picasso was a classically trained artist, but no one really knows that without studying him. With all the crazy looking works he produced, no one could have ever thought he could draw something so technically perfect. Cosmonauts Day, despite their self-proclaimed “post-metal/progressive sludge” label, can still produce some good, ol’ fashioned post-rock.

Rating: I only mentioned it once, but this was Cosmonauts Day’s first full-length outing, and they did exceptionally well. Beauty, mystique, energy and fury all wrapped up in a bow, Paths of the Restless deserves a 4/5.